The True Benjamin Franklin. Fisher Sydney George

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СКАЧАТЬ standing on this question in medical history. It would seem that he merely collected and expressed the observations of others as well as his own; none of them were entirely new, and many of them are now considered unsound.

      Nearer to the truth is Parton’s statement that “he was the first effective preacher of the blessed gospel of ventilation.” He certainly studied that subject very carefully, and was an authority on it, being appointed while in England to prepare a plan for ventilating the Houses of Parliament. It would, however, be better to say that he was one of the most prominent advocates of ventilation rather than the first effective preacher of it; for in Bigelow’s edition of his works1 will be found an excellent essay on the subject in which the other advocates are mentioned. But Parton goes on to say, “He spoke, and the windows of hospitals were lowered; consumption ceased to gasp and fever to inhale poison;” which is an extravagant statement that he would find difficulty, I think, in supporting.

      In Franklin’s published works there is a short essay called “A Conjecture as to the Cause of the Heat of the Blood in Health and of the Cold and Hot Fits of Some Fevers.” The blood is heated, he says, by friction in the action of the heart, by the distention and contraction of the arteries, and by being forced through minute vessels. This essay is very ingenious and well written, and the position given to it in his works might lead one to suppose that it was of importance; but I am informed by physicians that it was merely the revamping of an ancient theory held long before his time, and quite without foundation.

      Franklin’s excursions into the domain of medicine are not, therefore, to be considered among his valuable contributions to the welfare of man, except so far as they encouraged him to advocate fresh air and ventilation, though they may have assisted him to take better care of his own health.

      Of the numerous portraits of him of varying merit, nearly all of which have been reproduced over and over again, only a few deserve consideration for the light they throw on his appearance and character. The Sumner portrait, as it used to be called, is supposed to have been painted in London in 1726, when he was there as a young journeyman printer, twenty years old, and was brought by him to America and given to his brother John, of Rhode Island. He evidently dressed himself for this picture in clothes he was not in the habit of wearing at his work; for he appears in a large wig, a long, decorated coat and waistcoat, with a mass of white ruffles on his bosom and conspicuous wrist-bands. The rotund and strongly developed figure is well displayed. Great firmness and determination are shown in the mouth and lower part of the face. The animal forces are evidently strong. The face is somewhat frank, and at the same time very shrewd. The eyes are larger than in the later portraits, which is not surprising, for eyes are apt to grow smaller in appearance with age.

      This portrait, which is now in Memorial Hall at Harvard University, has been supposed by some critics not to be a portrait of Franklin at all. How, they ask, could Franklin, who was barely able to earn his living at that time, and whose companions were borrowing a large part of his spare money, afford to have an oil-painting made of himself in such expensive costume? and why is there no mention of this portrait in any of his writings? But, on the other hand, the portrait has the peculiar set expression of the mouth and the long chin which were so characteristic of Franklin; and it would have been entirely possible for him to have borrowed the clothes and had the picture painted cheaply or as a kindness. It is not well painted, need not have been expensive, and, as there were no photographs then, paintings were the only way by which people could give their likenesses to relatives.

      The Martin portrait, painted when he was about sixty years old, represents him seated, his elbows resting on a table, and holding a document, which he is reading with deep but composed and serene attention. It was no doubt intended to represent him in a characteristic attitude. As showing the calm philosopher and diplomat reading and thinking, somewhat idealized and yet a more or less true likeness, it is in many respects the best picture we have of him. But we cannot see the eyes, and it does not reveal as much character as we could wish.

      The Grundmann portrait, an excellent photograph of which hangs in the Philadelphia Library, was painted by a German artist, after a careful study of Franklin’s career and of all the portraits of him which had been painted from life. As an attempt to reproduce his characteristics and idealize them it is a distinct success and very interesting. He is seated in a chair, in his court-dress, with long stockings and knee-breeches, leaning back, his head and shoulders bent forward, while his gaze is downward. He is musing over something, and there is that characteristic shrewd smile on the lower part of the rugged face. It is the smile of a most masterful and cunning intellect; but no one fears it: it seems as harmless as your mother’s. You try to imagine which one of his thousand clever strokes and sayings was passing through his mind that day; and the strong, intensely individualized figure, which resembles that of an old athlete, is wonderfully suggestive of life, experience, and contest.

      But the Duplessis portrait, which was painted from life in Paris in 1778, when he was seventy-two, reveals more than any of them. The Sumner portrait is Franklin the youth; the Martin and the Grundmann portraits are Franklin the philosopher and statesman; the Duplessis portrait is Franklin the man.

      Unfortunately, it is impossible to get a good reproduction of the Duplessis portrait, because there is so much detail in it and the coloring and lights and shadows cannot be successfully copied. But any one who will examine the original or any good replicas of it in oil will, I am convinced, see Franklin as he really was. The care in details, the wrinkles, and the color of the skin give us confidence in it as a likeness. The round, strong, but crude form of the boy of twenty has been beaten and changed by time into a hundred qualities and accomplishments, yet the original form is still discernible, and the face looks straight at us: we see the eyes and every line close at hand.

      In this, the best portrait for studying Franklin’s eye, we see at once that it is the eye of a very sensuous man, and we also see many details which mark the self-made man, the man who never had been and never pretended to be an aristocrat. This is in strong contrast to Washington’s portraits, which all disclose a man distinctly of the upper class and conscious of it.

      But, in spite of this homeliness in the Duplessis portrait and the easy, careless manner in which the clothes are worn, there are no signs of what might be called vulgarity. The wonderful and many-sided accomplishments of the man carried him well above this. Brought up as a boy at candle- and soap-making, he nevertheless, when prosperous, turned instinctively to higher things and refined accomplishments and was comparatively indifferent to material wealth. Nor do we find in him any of that bitter hostility and jealousy of the established and successful which more modern experience might lead us to expect.

      The Duplessis portrait conforms to what we read of Franklin in representing him as hale and vigorous at seventy-two. The face is full of lines, but they are the lines of thought, and of thought that has come easily and cheerfully; there are no traces of anxiety, gnawing care, or bitterness. In Paris, at the time the Duplessis portrait was painted, Franklin was regarded as a rather unusual example of vigor and good health in old age. John Adams in his Diary uses him as a standard, and speaks of other old men in France as being equal or almost equal to him in health.

      Although not so free from disease as were his parents, he was not much troubled with it until late in life. When a young man of about twenty-one he had a bad attack of pleurisy, of which he nearly died. It terminated in an abscess of the left lung, and when this broke, he was almost suffocated by the quantity and suddenness of the discharge. A few years afterwards he had a similar attack of pleurisy, ending in the same way; and it was an abscess in his lung which finally caused his death. The two abscesses which he had when a young man seem to have left no ill effects; and after his two attacks of pleurisy he was free from serious sickness for many years, until at the age of fifty-one he went to England to represent the Province of Pennsylvania. Soon after landing he was attacked by an obscure fever, of which he does not give the name, and which disabled him for eight weeks. He was delirious, and they cupped him and gave him enormous quantities of bark.

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